The disclosure relates generally to computer data storage, and more particularly to highly scalable and distributed data sharing and storage using parallel file systems.
Systems and applications in specialized fields, like those in healthcare, are increasingly interconnected by networks, generating large amounts of data, and sharing data produced by interconnected devices. For example, in a hospital environment, computed axial tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems may be producing MRI and CAT images for some patients while bio-assay instruments in the hospital's laboratories may be recording test results for other patients. At the same time, doctors and nurses may be generating, accessing, and storing patient data from numerous interconnected medical equipment, devices, and workstations in the hospital. The data may be in different file system formats. It is often a challenge to provide an efficient and readily scalable mechanism for storing and accessing data in such a widely distributed, interconnected, and diverse system.
In a typical large networked environment, various specialized equipment, devices, client and server computers may send their data through a network to a centralized data storage system for storing. The data storage system may maintain data in a particular file structure. When data is later accessed by application modalities in the network, the data is retrieved and may need to be transformed to other file system formats before the accessing modalities may use it. Such a process causes delays due to the conversion from one file format to another. In addition, when archiving data, excessive delays may be encountered in a data storage system which does not scale well and requires several independent storage subsystems within the network. The application modalities would need to search for desired data in such independent subsystems.
As the number of interconnected modalities in various computers, devices and equipment increases, more data is generated and shared among these application modalities. In addition, the application modalities may be in different types of devices and systems, produced by various manufacturers, and may use different file protocols for storing and sharing data.
Other environments that have a large number of interconnected application modalities and substantial amount of shared data include oil and mineral exploration, retail, stock trading, weather forecast, space exploration, seismic data collection, military intelligence, security and surveillance, digital motion pictures, etc.
There is such as a need for a highly scalable distributed system that enables seamless storing and sharing of a large volume of data among a large number of interconnected devices, systems, and applications.